Computer Controlled Bacteria

In research that further bridges the biological and digital world, scientists at the University of California, San Francisco have created bacteria that can be programmed like a computer.

Researchers built “logic gates” – the building blocks of a circuit – out of genes and put them into E. coli bacteria strains. The logic gates mimic digital processing and form the basis of computational communication between cells, according to synthetic biologist Christopher A. Voigt.

While the cells’ logic operations are still resigned to simple functions, Voigt said the research lays the groundwork for cellular communication similar to computers.

The findings hold promise for fields such as agriculture and the pharmaceutical industry, where researchers use bioengineering to enhance plant genetics.

“DNA is sort of the programming language for life,” Voigt told CNN in a telephone interview over the weekend.

“It’s not that we’re trying to replace computers with living cells. But it means we could gain programmable control of everything biology can do. You’d like to be able to control all these programs.”

Voigt said the ultimate aim is to create intricate computer code that can be read by living cells.

“We want to create a programming language for bacteria,” he said. “We want to program code for bacteria just like you would for a computer. A lot of the other work my lab does has to do with coming up with algorithms – just like a programmer would do – and converting that into a DNA sequence.”

“At some point, Microsoft Word had to have been converted to 1s and Os. It’s the same way with cells,” Voigt said. “What we’ve done here is created a fundamental language to show that they can work in bacteria. We still have a lot fewer circuits that you could use in computers.”